Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Creativity is all well and good, but it should be combined with spelling. It’s a lot easier to spell “said” correctly if you haven’t got muscle memory of writing “sed” in the first place.

This is where they should be using technology. Have the child tell a story to their screen to exercise creativity. Then let the computer translate it to something spelled correctly that the student can copy to practice spelling.

Anonymous wrote:^^but that being said, I agree that elementary school spends too much time on weird video clip "brain breaks" and ipad games in early elementary. i'm glad it's being rolled back in our kids school. however, telling kids to be kind when reading eachother's work is not a bad thing. we DO want to encourage reading and writing. imagine if your kid wrote a paragraph and his friend said "this is stupid. i cant even tell what these words are supposed to spell anyways.". Would that encourage a sensitive child to write better, or to not write/ write less/ use only words they are positive they can spell, therefore discouraging the use of larger more complex words and sentence structures? some kids would take that sort of feedback as a challenge at age 7, sure. But not most.

A 7 year old who is spelling “said” as “sed” is not doing it at 17. Relax.

Anonymous wrote:Creativity is all well and good, but it should be combined with spelling. It’s a lot easier to spell “said” correctly if you haven’t got muscle memory of writing “sed” in the first place.

This is where they should be using technology. Have the child tell a story to their screen to exercise creativity. Then let the computer translate it to something spelled correctly that the student can copy to practice spelling.

Anonymous wrote:^^but that being said, I agree that elementary school spends too much time on weird video clip "brain breaks" and ipad games in early elementary. i'm glad it's being rolled back in our kids school. however, telling kids to be kind when reading eachother's work is not a bad thing. we DO want to encourage reading and writing. imagine if your kid wrote a paragraph and his friend said "this is stupid. i cant even tell what these words are supposed to spell anyways.". Would that encourage a sensitive child to write better, or to not write/ write less/ use only words they are positive they can spell, therefore discouraging the use of larger more complex words and sentence structures? some kids would take that sort of feedback as a challenge at age 7, sure. But not most.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If a child is a bad speller, it is reassuring to hear don’t worry about spelling. And just because a child is a bad speller does not mean the child is dumb or hasn’t been read to enough.

It’s the person who judges bad spellers as not well read or dumb are the ignorant ones. My doctor spells phonetically unless he’s on the computer with spell check. It’s just a weakness in spelling. It has nothing to do with his intellectual ability.

Is English your doctor's first language?

Anonymous wrote:^^but that being said, I agree that elementary school spends too much time on weird video clip "brain breaks" and ipad games in early elementary. i'm glad it's being rolled back in our kids school. however, telling kids to be kind when reading eachother's work is not a bad thing. we DO want to encourage reading and writing. imagine if your kid wrote a paragraph and his friend said "this is stupid. i cant even tell what these words are supposed to spell anyways.". Would that encourage a sensitive child to write better, or to not write/ write less/ use only words they are positive they can spell, therefore discouraging the use of larger more complex words and sentence structures? some kids would take that sort of feedback as a challenge at age 7, sure. But not most.

Anonymous wrote:If a child is a bad speller, it is reassuring to hear don’t worry about spelling. And just because a child is a bad speller does not mean the child is dumb or hasn’t been read to enough.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If a child is a bad speller, it is reassuring to hear don’t worry about spelling. And just because a child is a bad speller does not mean the child is dumb or hasn’t been read to enough.

It’s the person who judges bad spellers as not well read or dumb are the ignorant ones. My doctor spells phonetically unless he’s on the computer with spell check. It’s just a weakness in spelling. It has nothing to do with his intellectual ability.

Is English your doctor's first language?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If a child is a bad speller, it is reassuring to hear don’t worry about spelling. And just because a child is a bad speller does not mean the child is dumb or hasn’t been read to enough.

It’s the person who judges bad spellers as not well read or dumb are the ignorant ones. My doctor spells phonetically unless he’s on the computer with spell check. It’s just a weakness in spelling. It has nothing to do with his intellectual ability.

Anonymous wrote:If a child is a bad speller, it is reassuring to hear don’t worry about spelling. And just because a child is a bad speller does not mean the child is dumb or hasn’t been read to enough.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Education is run by progressive liberals who don't understand the consequences of their soft teaching.

We need to be focused on educating our kids with math and reading. And discipline, consequences. For all kids. We are too focused on feelings, making kids feel good.

As the saying goes, the worst preparation of adulthood is a stress free childhood.

How can we get back to actually educating our children as a society? I don’t mean a return to rapping kids with rulers, just telling kids they are WRONG when they say 2+2 =5 or spell “said” as “sed.” Right now they are complimented on their thinking and creativity and asked how they got there and to please show everyone else how they did it. No! Don’t teach 20 kids the wrong way! Tell the 1 kid that he is wrong and here is the correct answer.

If you volunteered in an actual classroom, you would see that teachers do that. But you want to invent a world in which schools somehow don't teach kids, when in reality, they very much do.

It's clear you have an agenda and are not basing your rants in reality.

Former teacher here. No, it really has become about feelings. And a lot of time is spent dealing with disruptive kids. Actually teaching is secondary.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Let me start by saying I am politically liberal to moderate. Truth be told I’m a kind of crunchy woo woo mom who bakes her own bran muffins and who doesn’t allow screen time at home except to watch movies like Sound of Music. No video games. No toy guns.

But public school is too liberal and lenient for me. My son is at an UMC public elementary and I think it’s absolute BS. They do whatever they want and FEEL. You disrupted class? Go take a walk and grab a snack with the resource person! Now that you kids have all clicked through this BS TPT worksheet on the iPad, you get FREE CHOICE and can either read a book OR play games on the iPad (Hmmm which one will a 6 year old pick?). Oh we did some HARD WORK. Let’s take a brain break and watch Mario and Luigi dance on the projector for 5 minutes.
Ok, now choose which book you want to read. We are goi mg to write! Wrote about anything that you think of while you read? What questions do you have? Let’s think about thinking and fill up this book with post its of random BS questions! Next let’s do some writing workshop - trade notebooks and see what you think! Don’t worry about spelling. We just want to encourage writing and be kind! (Note - this would be considered a highly productive day. I don’t even think they do this all one a day.)

I think there should be consequences and kids need to know it’s not ok to disrupt 20 other students. You don’t get a snack as a reward!You might have questions about a book, great, but why don’t we first talk about setting, plot, characters? Why doesn’t the teacher TELL the kids what to look for and read for and notice? And any written work should be read and marked up the teacher. The teacher should mark spelling without worrying about hurt feelings.

Am I alone here? Is home school all that is open to me? I can’t afford 60k for private school, and based on some posts I read here they may not even be any better. Please tell me it magically gets better later. 5th grade? 8th grade?

How old are your kids, OP? I have a kindergartener and a second grader in public school. Let me take a few of your points one at a time.

1. Prioritizing work based on a kid's feelings. Your characterization of this strikes me as a more Montessori approach that I'm not seeing in public school. My kids' teachers have set schedules every day where the kids are told what they are going to learn. When it's math time, the kid doesn't get to decide they feel like reading, because the class is doing math and reading time is after lunch. Within that schedule, there is time for centers (in kindergarten anyway) and time for independent work to allow kids to pursue topics they're more interested in (my oldest sometimes asks for extra math worksheets from the teacher and sometimes reads a book). That seems valuable to me.

2. Discipline. Different kids need different kinds of discipline. Some kids will escalate even further out of control if they are shut down with traditional discipline. The kid going for a walk with the resource teacher might need that to move him out of his disruptive episode. My oldest has a hard time recognizing when she's hungry and then she gets hangry, so giving her a snack isn't a "reward" for her bad behavior, it's the way to calm her down. All of this to say that I wouldn't discount an approach without knowing the specifics of when it is used. And particularly with young kids, talking about their feelings is an important way to help them learn how to process them. Kids can both lose privileges as a punishment for being disruptive AND talk to someone about their feelings to help them learn to handle their emotions better next time.

3. Technology in the classroom. I don't like how much technology there is in classrooms these days. I'm on board with "brain breaks" in theory, but it seems like it's often 5 minutes of Danny Go. There's an argument to be made that it gets them up and moving for a few minutes, but I wish we could find a way to get them more physical movement time throughout the day than sticking a screen in front of them. That said, my kids are not constantly on their iPads at school. They have scheduled/limited iPad time in the classroom to work on Lexia or ST Math or listen to audiobooks. My 2nd grader used her iPad last week to do research on the Boston Tea Party for a group presentation she's working on. I get a weekly report of their website usage and the sites/apps they're using are all educational. I do wish I knew more about the actual learning outcomes of these gamified learning apps, like Lexia. Is my kid actually retaining the learning or just getting the rush of passing the level and then losing the concept?

4. Reading analysis. Again, I'd love to know the ages of your kids, but you said they're young children, so I'm going to assume they're in the K-2nd grade range. In my experience, the goal of reading in kindergarten is to get the kids asking questions about the story. Any question. The goal is engaging with the story after the book is closed. In first grade, my oldest started learning the structure of a story (characters, setting, plot). Talking about the story was more teacher-led and less student-led, with questions like, "Who were the main characters? What was the problem and how did they solve it? What do you think might happen next and what clues in the story make you think that? Etc." In second grade, they started mapping out their own stories using the three-act structure (introduction - climax - resolution). So, if you have a kindergartener, the more structured learning you're looking for is probably coming next year and beyond, but kindergarten has to lay the groundwork for engaging with the reading.

5. Student-led writing. Again, if you have a kindergartener, practicing writing is the point. It's important for fine motor skills and recognizing the letters. It almost doesn't matter what they're writing about. Spelling is important, but in kindergarten, they're still working on learning the sounds of letters, so if they spell it "sed" instead of "said" at least they got the sound right, and we can correct the spelling later. That said, the word "said" was taught to my kids as a "heart word" with the appropriate spelling from the beginning of kindergarten. In first grade, my oldest started getting corrections to her spelling, and in second grade she has started having true spelling tests where correct spelling is the point. Is your school using phonics or still stuck on the whole word method? If your school isn't using phonics, that might be reason enough to pull your kid.

Overall, it seems like you aren't recognizing the value of some of the "softer" lessons you're complaining about (tailored discipline approaches, learning to navigate feelings, fine motor skills, and understanding reading as an active process) and might not have kids old enough yet to be seeing more of the structure you want out of public school.

Anonymous wrote:If young children being taught what to think is unpopular in your circles, then you run in stupid circles.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Education is run by progressive liberals who don't understand the consequences of their soft teaching.

We need to be focused on educating our kids with math and reading. And discipline, consequences. For all kids. We are too focused on feelings, making kids feel good.

As the saying goes, the worst preparation of adulthood is a stress free childhood.

How can we get back to actually educating our children as a society? I don’t mean a return to rapping kids with rulers, just telling kids they are WRONG when they say 2+2 =5 or spell “said” as “sed.” Right now they are complimented on their thinking and creativity and asked how they got there and to please show everyone else how they did it. No! Don’t teach 20 kids the wrong way! Tell the 1 kid that he is wrong and here is the correct answer.